What would Ignatius say about our educational apostolate today?

By Joseph Lobo, SJ

When St Ignatius of Loyola ventured into the apostolate of Education, his original intention was to form persons of moral character, who would influence society and culture with the spirit of the Gospel as “fires that kindle other fires”. In other words, Ignatius was aiming at transforming human society by transforming the human individual by the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. By this, he was intending to respond to the situation of moral degradation and related evils of his times. The other benefits of education were perhaps only of a secondary importance in his thinking, if at all they existed. 

Therefore, presupposing that this original intention of St Ignatius continues to exist in varying degrees even in today’s Jesuit Education of all types and at all levels, the question we have to ask is: how would it shape the concrete structures, processes, dynamics, content, outcome and goals of our education today?

For this, we need to become aware of a basic and most fundamental schema of a constructive learning process. It can be expressed as follows: ignorance – information – knowledge – wisdom – virtue. 

Since these are simultaneous processes with successive starting points, and continue to exist despite the progress, they can be more meaningfully represented as follows:

Ignorance|—————————————————————-

Information|———————————————————-

Knowledge|——————————————————-

Wisdom|——————————————————

Virtue|—————————————————-

Let me explain the schema and the terms: We begin with ignorance at our conception and begin to gather data through sense perception, intellectual processes and affective experiences. The data so gathered is recorded in various degrees as discrete pieces of information. We become informed persons.

How would the original intention of St Ignatius shape the concrete structures, processes, dynamics, content, outcome and goals of our educational apostolate today?

When these discrete pieces begin to be put together into certain patterns in a systematic and meaningful way, knowledge emerges. One can get stuck at the level of information, being very informative but least knowledgeable; not knowing how the discrete pieces of information are related. The reason may have been that the process of interiorization and integration did not take place. In fact many an ‘educated’ person are well-formed, but hardly knowledgeable. Rote learning and the blind use of internet search engines produce such persons en masse.

Knowledge gives rise to wisdom, when the acquired knowledge is used for the ‘promotion of life’ – to use a collective phrase that represents an ethical or moral way of using the knowledge. This transition from knowledge to wisdom necessarily consists of the crucial aspects of inspiration, interiorization and integration. A great scientist can have a lot of knowledge but can use it unwisely, if s/he were to invent or construct only lethal weapons. A very knowledgeable intellectual can hardly be called wise, if s/he were to use her/ his acumen to devise notoriously deceptive political and business strategies, exploitative economic and trade policies, disruptive public debates, and even dangerous religious and ‘spiritual’ discourses, because of ill-formed conscience. It could be alarming to note how many of such ‘knowledgeable’ persons sans compassion and conscience were educated in our institutions!

The Ignatian vision of education needs to be brought to the center of our educational apostolate, as it is the very rationale of all our apostolates.

When one behaves ‘wisely’ in a habitual manner – not merely occasionally – s/he can be said to be a ‘virtuous person’. If one acts ‘wisely’ only occasionally or selectively, s/he has not yet achieved the true virtue, because s/he lacks a discerning heart.

The Ignatian educational apostolate was meant primarily to produce ‘virtuous persons’ in this sense. Accordingly, such persons collectively could bring about an integral societal transformation. This schema, if used as a lens to look at the educational processes in different Jesuit educational institutions, gives us an inkling into what exactly we, along with our collaborators, are busy with. Are we truly producing ‘virtuous persons’? Are there effective structures, systems, processes and sizable number of convinced, committed and competent individuals to ensure such results in our institutions? To the extent these questions can be answered affirmatively, let us rejoice!

At the same time let us not duck the inconvenient question whether our students are not perhaps sadly stuck at some earlier stages of learning? Isn’t it true that very few of our students progress into later stages? Has it perhaps become impossible for our institutions to produce virtuous persons? What are the internal and external factors at the personal and structural levels that prevent this progress? Does the overall context of the day in the first place really tolerate a structure, a system or an institution that produces ‘virtuous persons’ of the Ignatian vision? Can such persons survive, function and flourish in the wider world once they leave our institutions? If they were to, what is the price that they may have to pay for ‘swimming against the currents’? Does our educational process create in them necessary sources of spiritual stamina that is necessary to live as virtuous persons?

It is from this Ignatian prism as explicated above that our success stories need to be evaluated. We may have pushed this issue to the peripheries. But the Ignatian vision of education needs to be brought to the center of our educational apostolate, as it is the very rationale of all our apostolates.

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